Author: Stefanija Kukunovska

Stefanija is a 22 years old blogger with a passion for learning new things every day. Her goal in life is to keep up to date with the latest technological (and footwear) trends, and she wants to explore and write about things that can make everyone's lives better. Her affair with Virtual Private Networks took up a notch when she realized she couldn't watch her favorite show "Black Mirror" anymore since its move to Netflix in 2016, so she went on blogging about the countless VPN services out there.

For a long time, China has used the Great Firewall (GFW)—a highly sophisticated set of tools for filtering content—to censor what users within its borders can access online. Recently, the Peoples’ Republic of China made a move to shut down the last bastion of uninhibited online access, but chances are that the move is going to backfire.
In January 2017, authorities in China embarked on a 14-month-long campaign to mop up the country’s large number of unauthorized websites. Among the top targets of the campaign were virtual private network (VPN) providers, who enable users to circumvent the GFW by tunneling users’ online activities to servers located in other countries, effectively altering the IP address and cloaking the identities of users. These VPN services, used by many to navigate to blocked websites such as Google, popular social media websites, and established online publications, are immensely popular among citizens who are interested in accessing foreign websites. However, VPN providers have been a nuisance to the Chinese government for a long time.